Being Bored Doesn't Make You Interesting

I have five questions for interesting people

Photo by Jonny Caspari on Unsplash

*Please note: at the end of this manifesto, I will be making a call for interested people to contact me if they want to be interviewed as an interesting person.*

We all have bandwidth limitations. Right now, my bandwidth is on par with that of some cheap satellite internet service out in the sticks.

For personal reasons that I won’t bore you with, I have no patience for smirking misanthropes who wear “too cool for school” as their entire personality. Snickering cool kids in the back of the class are the worst. I’m very grateful that I rarely have this problem with my actual students, but sadly the trait persists long beyond our school days.

There is a segment of our government that embodies this: elected officials who have somehow been sent to Washington on nothing but the strength of a cynical, transgressive branding.

Our most commercially successful satirists have crassly and lazily cashed in on this time-tested style of comedy for decades now, endlessly, mechanically reproducing cringy Daily Show bits for fun and profit.

And it’s common knowledge that a successful social media persona is built on the predictable production of a kind of banal shitposting that passes itself off as the world-weariness of a wise and learned sage. Surely these people know that there is no clever quote-tweet of Elon Musk that will ever pass as insightful or useful. Surely they know this, right?

Yet we go on with all this because we can literally think of nothing else to do with this technology. And there is nothing else we can do with this technology because this is what the technology is designed to do. Everyone on social media knows they are part of a weaponized, B.F. Skinner-inspired, behaviorist, money-making scam, yet everyone continues to log on, tune in, and drop out.

Being Bored Is Not a Sign of Taste

The particular version of this that I want to discuss has to do with the reception and discussion of art (that is my wheelhouse, after all). And I want to aim my scorn at the supposedly educated classes.

Once, you’ve taught young people long enough, you’ve surely encountered the student who just can’t accept that a great work of art is great because they find it “boring.” It’s pretty common to encounter a reaction along the lines of “I don’t see why everyone thinks Citizen Kane is great because I thought it was boring.” The reason this student finds it boring is, of course, easy to understand. It was made in 1941 and bears no stylistic or thematic resemblance to any kind of media entertainment they’ve consumed in their lives. It may not even register as a movie to them, raised as they were on the MCU.

I would be lying if I said this kind of reaction did not frustrate me on some level, but I can honestly say that it doesn’t really upset me. They are young and limited by their experience and if someone showed me a Tarkovsky movie when I was 18 I would have thought it was boring too.

I like to think that I’ve matured a bit in my life and now I understand that when I watched these kinds of films at that age and found them boring, it wasn’t actually the film, it was me. My dislike of Citizen Kane as a young man said way more about me and my limitations than it did about Orson Welles. I now realize that the film wasn’t boring, I was.

So I try to extend some grace to the young people who I show these kinds of movies to (and I’m always shocked at how much more gracious they are about the process than I was at their age).

No, my real disgust is reserved for the highly-educated culture warriors. You see them on Twitter all the time, announcing that they, with their Brown University diplomas can confidently inform us that The Great Gatsby is, actually, VERY BAD. And no one should feel like they should read it because — hey just trust them because they are an expert; didn’t you hear about their educational pedigree?

Like everything else on social media, there is a script to this kind of discourse that even the smartest people slavishly follow. The part that really galls me and insults every class-conscious bone in my Lefty body, is the inevitable moment when the Brown grad positions themselves as being a populist for making public this revelation.

It is THEY who are standing up to the elitists out there, those horrid people who want to share a book that was meaningful to them with others, kids who probably didn’t grow up in the suburbs of Connecticut and didn’t have the classics drilled into them as part of the cultural inheritance that went along with the financial one that paid for that damn Brown degree in the first place. THEY are the ones pointing out the PRIVILEGE of those fascists who think it’s a good thing to share the great art of the past on to the next generation. THEY, with their elite degree, who has actually read and judged Proust to be really kind of a dumpster fire bore is here to tell EVERYONE that the working class kids should just be reading YA, because that is actually insightful and brilliant in a way that Virginia Woolf SO ISN’T. Just trust them.

OK, I’ve clearly squeezed out as much sarcasm as I can here and have probably overdone it, but this really irritates me.

What I’ve described is a cultural form of adopting an aloof lack of interest as a personality, a claim on distinction and enlightenment. “I’m smarter than you and I show it by being bored by things that lesser folk find interesting or worthwhile.”

This attitude is actually worse than the corresponding one of the 18 year-old working class kid who doesn’t like Citizen Kane yet. The fact that the highly-educated classes so often make these rhetorical moves actually makes me question the value of education. And I say this as an educator. Seriously. If the end result of education is you becoming a smug elitist, what was the point? I’m reminded of a thought-provoking question from a certain nihilistic psychopath:

If you think you’re doing the Lord’s work by using your cultural sophistication to LARP as the witty, learned contrarian when it comes to art, let me aim another question at you:

Who do you think you are?

Who are you to stand in the way of someone else’s experience with the world? Just because you already read Gatsby and have, as they like to say, “moved on,” why do you think it’s your duty to stand in the way of other people finding that book at their own pace, in their own time.

First of all, it’s not like the world is choked full of people eager to read ANY book these days anyway. If someone wants to start with the standard “classics,” so what? Let them! Whenever I read that Twitter thread that gets resuscitated every few months about “David Foster Wallace Bros,” my response is “Where do you live that you are meeting SO MANY people who read David Foster Wallace. Just who is the privileged one here?

But second, and more importantly, not everyone had the opportunity to have the classics jammed down their throats at a young age. What seems cliche and old-hat to you may be exciting and new to someone who is less — I say it again — privileged than you.

I will take an ignorant, curious person who has a sense of hospitality towards art and other people over the expertly refined, overly sophisticated sensibilities of an educated elite any day of the week.

Interesting People: You Out There?

Someone (I honestly can’t remember who) told me once that “interested people are interesting people.” I love this. But it implies its inverse, doesn’t it? Bored people are boring people.

To circle back to the intro, I don’t have any bandwidth left for boring people anymore. I’m at the age where time is heavily gathered behind me and I have no guarantee of how much lies in front of me. I refuse to waste whatever I have left on boring people who are too cool for school.

Recently, I saw on Twitter where a quite famous academic was interviewed by some podcast that apparently asks all the learned and wise people they talk to name something they think is “overrated.”

It won’t surprise you by now that I think this question is abominable and that asking it should be grounds for a lengthy detention in a gulag. Never ask me about something that I think is “overrated.” Feel free to ask me about things that are underrated instead. Don’t be boring.

Nonetheless, the episode gave me an idea for a new periodic feature for this Substack and I’m pretty excited about it.

Substack has been a wonderful experience for me. I love subscribing to as many as I can and it’s actually made me excited about email notifications, if you can believe it. Plus, I’ve been invited into many really thoughtful conversations with readers of UnTaking and the whole thing has been an incredibly gratifying alternative to the toxicity of social media.

The idiotic podcast question I referenced above gave me the idea that maybe I could throw some attention the way of actually interesting people — you know, interested people. People who approach the world with open arms, hospitality, and curiosity.

The Idea

What I want to do is a series of short (15 min) interviews with Substackers and other people who are actually interesting, not just desperately posturing on social media to be seen as the coolest kid in the back of the class. The interviews will be hosted right here on the native Substack podcasting platform.

So, reach out to me if you want to be featured on “Five Questions for Interesting People.” And if it helps you make your decision, here are the five questions:

1. How are you trying to make the world better with your work?

2. How did a particular place make you who you are today?

3. Think about a person you have lost. How did the shape of your life change to adjust to that loss?

4. What’s a beautiful thing that most people don’t appreciate enough?

5. If your life were a novel, what the final chapter be?

I’ll be seeking out people on my own to invite into this conversation, but please consider reaching out to me as well, either on your own behalf or someone else you’d like to hear. And share this call with others, too. That would be really nice of you.

And even if you don’t want to talk with me about these questions, I think they’re pretty good ones just to think about in your quieter moments.

I’m really looking forward to these conversations and I’m looking forward to getting started.

Be interesting!